Google page rank, back links, forward links & link juice

While in life it’s nice to be popular, on the internet it’s vital.

Search engines rank popular sites (pages with a good Google Page Rank) very highly and Optimise My Website will work to have other, carefully chosen and relevant sites that also have a good page rank link into yours, providing you not only with a greater client network but high quality back links, link juice and a high level of importance in the eyes of Google, MSN and Yahoo.

Despite what you were told you as a kid, sometimes it IS important to be popular!

Below we'll explain some terms you may have heard:

Back links & Forward Links

A Back Link or BackLink is the name given to a link from someone else's website to a page on your website. A Forward Link is the name given to a link from your website to a page on some one else's website. Simple!

Link Baiting

Link baiting has recently become one of the preferred ways to achieve natural links from other web sites. To Link Bait is to create a webpage topic that naturally attracts Back Links to your web page by people finding the content of your page interesting and engaging, discussing it on forums, blogs and linking to it from their own sites.

Link Juice

Link Juice refers to the passing of PageRank from one web site to another. If a back linked web page has a high Google PageRank then a link from their website has a lot of 'Link Juice'.

Google Page Rank

The following explanation of Google's PageRank is from Google Technology Explained website and may have recently changed:

Google PageRank Explained

"PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query."